P2P licensed premiere movie download service to launch in Germany

Burbank (CA) - Once more indicating the digital entertainment industry is evolving more quickly in Europe than anywhere else, a new P2P download service for licensed, and purportedly secure, movies, is gearing up for a March launch for customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment today announced In2Movies, its joint venture with European mobile infrastructure provider Arvato Mobile, which it states will make available a new digital download platform for fully licensed content, to be made available day-and-date with continental release of the same content in video stores. While Warner provides the content, Arvato supplies the underlying technology, called GNAB, which blends the decentralized distribution approach of peer-to-peer with a purportedly strong, though evidently proprietary, digital rights management system.

The three key virtues of P2P, mentioned throughout today’s joint announcement by Warner and Arvato, are convenience, "community interaction," and download speed realized through decentralization. However, the chief of Warner Bros. Entertainment’s German division, Willi Geike was quoted as saying that the same service will be used as "a turn-key digital distribution solution for DVD retailers all over Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland." In other words, remote video stores could conceivably download their content, and produce licensed videos for retail sale to customers. Whether these customers, too, will feel the virtues of membership in the P2P community, wasn’t stated.

The announcement cited a study by German research firm GFK/FFA, stating that 73 percent of respondents who admitted illegally downloading videos, stated they would be willing to consider a "paid for" alternative, if one were made available to them. This could be the beginning of a not-so-subtle admission by the content industry that illegal downloaders felt compelled to do so by the restrictive, or unevolved, nature of the existing retail channels. It’s debatable whether making retail customers feel they’re members of a community through the deployment of a decentralized download system, will help curb illegal downloads. But then again, if people seated comfortably in their homes and going nowhere, can be made to feel they’re members of such a community, perhaps there’s more to this proposition than at first meets the eye.

Version 1 of the In2Movies service, which launches in March, will make German-language videos available for download to PC ; version 2, whose launch date was not stated, will incorporate DVD-Rs and "other portable devices." One hopes the German-speaking community will pardon the joint venture’s backers for having chosen a clearly English-derived name for the service.